In her early poems H. D. expressed a particularly feminine viewpoint in relation to the poetic tradition. As time went on this stance became more and more clearly defined; today we would call it feminist. It is important to understand how H. D.'s particular poetic sensibility, which she expresses in a metaphorical or palimpsest way of thinking and writing, differs from the more masculine poetic thrust.

What we must first come to understand in H. D.'s poetry is what we might call a figural or allegorical interpretation of nature. Every natural occurrence, in all its everyday reality, is correspondingly a part of a spiritual world order, which is also experiential and in which every event is related to every other event. In the western literary tradition, nature has traditionally been understood to be feminine and mute; H. D. makes nature speak. Because her perspective is feminine rather than masculine, she interprets events in terms of the timeless natural world rather than in terms of the historical process. This perspective is immediately recognizable as one of psychological or spiritual realism. Once events occur, they occur for all eternity and persist into the future as a portion of our inherited body of fate. The Greek dramatists, whom H. D. studied, knew full well the tragic personal and political consequences of being unaware of (or forgetting) one's fate. It is important to understand that H. D.'s poems are not poems of desire; neither are they prophecies of historical occurrences or poems of social protest. Rather, they are presentations of a situation.

Pound had presented H. D. with a situation in which she lost either way: she could either go back home to America with her parents or submit to Pound outside of the context of marriage. Both alternatives were unacceptable to her in the sense that they were inconsistent and incompatible with the person she had become. Her response was to present the situation as she had experienced it. That presentation turned out to be poetry…. When confronted with two equally unacceptable alternatives it is important to choose a third; that is, it is important to create one's own alternative. This is the feminist basis of H. D.'s poetic stance. (pp. 56-7)

H. D. expresses a good deal of defensiveness and resistance as well as sadness and a sense of loss in her early poetry. The loneliness, vulnerability, and sense of estrangement and uprootedness that come with a decision to defy the masculine impulse and create one's own space is expressed in "Hermonax," published in Poetry magazine in February 1914. (p. 57)

H. D.'s poems had been written according to Hulme's principles as a process of disentanglement. But the manner in which Pound appropriated them and acted as though they were written for him simply shocked her. By his manner he made them his own—his to edit, his to publish, his to interpret…. If H. D. had not been in shock, she might have reclaimed her own work, published her poems in her own way, in her own good time, and in her own interpretive context. But once Pound had defined a context for her poetry, it was important for her to redefine that context, so she had to keep writing in order to do so….

In a sense H. D.'s poems came out of the tension of a situation in which two men, Pound and Aldington, were fighting for her. (p. 58)

Another factor to take into account in understanding H. D.'s emergence as a poet is that she certainly did not know what it meant for a woman to publish poetry in the extremely patriarchal world of 1913. In the very act in which H. D. was attempting to recover herself—the act of writing the poem—she was, through the action of men, throwing herself into the center of a man's world as a muse (that is, a woman who is other than a wife; a woman who is considered by men to be in the category of hetaera). Ironically then, the very act by which she is attempting to recover herself as her mother's child can result in a separation from her mother forever….

What is clear is that [H. D.] did not cross the line from the world dominated by feminine values into the world dominated by masculine ones with no way back. In some sense she crossed that line in her imagination—she had some sense of what it meant to be in the milieu of the masculine wisdom. But instead of being either in the matriarchal or the patriarchal world, she became an artist and created a world of her own—a world in which her mind was in control of her experience. (p. 59)

H. D. came to understand the poem not as an assertion of phallic desire, but as presentation, an act of birth, a means of disentanglement from the burden of the inseminating thought, and a way to recovery of primal integrity. (p. 61)